Secularism Tag

Preface The University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) has consistently earned high rankings in the world as “16th in the world for academics and 13th in the world for reputation” and boasts of being affiliated with several Nobel laureates. Its noble motto, “let there be light” has echoes from the Vedic Tamasoma Jyotirgamaya. A University that boasts of such credentials usually means that it adheres to the highest academic standards in both teaching, course material, textbook prescriptions, recommended and additional reading, faculty-selection… at the least, it implies that when youRead More

How often have you heard this refrain or its variants: Naah! I don’t go to temples. I don’t like going to temples…I mean, there’s no point…all that noise, meaningless mantras and rituals…some are so unhygienic…I believe in God but I’m spiritual…after all, Hinduism is a personal religion and I don’t really need to go to a temple to pray….? How often have you yourself uttered this refrain? Answer honestly. Admittedly, there’s a grain of truth in each of these bits. Several temples today are dirty, unhygienic, noisy, and appear meaninglessRead More

Preface Let’s call things by their proper name. What is continuing to unfold in Assam is soft Jihad. It isn’t an ethnic strife, much less a riot. It is soft Jihad not in terms of the scale or intensity of violence but because it is not explicitly unleashed by an Islamic state—or by an Islamic terrorist-superstar like Bin Laden—against a non-Islamic state. It follows a theological dictum from which emerged a time-tested pattern, which has been consistently repeated across both world history and geography. I argue that: What we’re seeingRead More

The latest news item to cause a fresh bout of uncontrollable loose motions in the Indian English media is seeing Narendra Modi’s picture on the cover of the Time magazine. Here’s the picture in question: Being the long-time Congress-cultivated Pavlovian breed that they are, the media wasted no time in giving wide coverage to the Congress party’s trashing of Modi instead of actually examining what the piece says. In a line, the Time piece authored by some Jyoti Thottam repeats the same lies about Modi’s involvement in the Gujarat riots,Read More

It looks like Salil Tripathi, of late, has been in the news for all the wrong reasons. First it was this piece on Center Right India that examined his claims of being a libertarian, pro-free market, etc that led to some delightful exchanges on Twitter. And then he wrote an opinion piece in Mint titled Incredible Impunity, which should actually be titled Brazen Bias. Of all the responses I read to this piece, only Kanchan Gupta’s two–part series that takes apart Salil’s hitjob on Modi is the best.Read More

Are death anniversaries celebrated? “Celebrated” is an unfortunate choice of word to use in the same breath as “death.” And no, that word choice is not mine. It is the media’s. Somebody’s death anniversary is not celebrated unless that person is someone like Stalin. Speaking of which, Jawaharlal Nehru was the only head of a democratic state in the world who mourned the death of “Marshall” Stalin. Death anniversaries of the truly great and noble people rightfully deserve the label Memorial Day. Does anybody “celebrate” Jallianwallah Bagh? If the answerRead More

First, credit where it is due: sincere thanks to my all-knowing Twitter friends Gopi and Ranganaathan for bringing this to my attention. Preface A certain Father Dominic Emmanuel seems to have taken it upon himself to educate the Honourable Justices of the Bhopal high court about whether the Bhagavad Gita is a philosophical book or a religious book. What is it with the preachers of Prophetic religions who seem to possess an itch-powder, the main effect of which is to interfere with the followers and teachings of other religions? WhatRead More

This was published today in the Pioneer. Comments and criticism welcome as always. By deftly using state power to promote the party’s first family, the Congress has created a unique political ecosystem. The media has collaborated. The Uttar Pradesh Assembly election has seen the media beaming footage of the Nehru-Gandhi family’s adventures in deception. Those who still harbour illusions about the media’s neutrality need to look at the Assembly election coverage. So why does the media stand so steadfastly by the Congress? And why does it portray the only otherRead More

Pick a name. Pick any name from the loathsome galaxy of the Politically Correct Sissies that I listed in the Part 1. Let’s start with the head honcho, the White Mughal himself. Hartosh Singh Bal’s searing piece elicited the predictable accusation of racism from the stung Mughal. Bal called the Mughal’s racist bluff telling him he doesn’t know what racism really means. Badly beaten, the Mughal slunk away muttering a “regret.” School day lessons work: a bully will never bother you again if you hit back with equal or greaterRead More

There’s nothing literary about the Jaipur Literary Festival. It’s as political as political is. The list of who’s who that make up its firmament year after year reads like the Forbes List of Liberal Fundamentalists. Perhaps Dalrymple’s List of Liberal Fundamentalists is a more accurate phrase. What “literature” have Shobaa De, Manil Suri, Pankaj Mishra, Ashis Nandy, Sonia Falerio, Suketu Mehta, Annie Zaidi, Anurag Mathur, and Tarun Tejpal written? Here’s a sample of the kind of “literary” discussions you get at that “festival:” political trash, milking the victimhood mammary, non-existentRead More

The Indian media overall is a whore with none of the ethics of a whore, a fact that’s pretty much self-evident now. Yet there are very few exceptions, and once in a long while somebody in this well-oiled and smoothly-functioning corporatized whoredom gets stung by the call of conscience and for a change, begins to tell the truth. That’s when the carrot-and-stick trick, as old as mankind, is employed. I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again: India is not a democracy and the Indian media is only asRead More

Let’s not pretend that the soul-crushing shrillery of the academic mullahs of Delhi—led mainly by the mini-mullahs of the history department—has anything to do with academic freedom or “curbing our freedom of thought” or “censorship of education” and such other arrant nonsense. It’s anything but that. It’s simply the latest instance of their decades-long ritual of opportunist sniffing to find out just how much damage their rabble-rousing can inflict. It’s the most recent manifestation of their insane loathing for everything Hindu, which prompted some of their elites to pervert IndianRead More

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This post is partly my response to an offline discussion I had with a blogger I admire, whose original post trigged this response. Jagadish writes: This makes it even tougher to explain how dark-skinned chaps became heroes in the epics

This BBC report barely manages to conceal its glee over a recent farce ceremony where “hundreds of Hindu Dalits” converted to Buddhism or Christianity. Dissecting the BBC’s sleazy reportage is not the focus of this post.

This post has adopted Ananda Coomaraswamy’s essay of the same title. I vaguely recall writing in this post, that Coomaraswamy typically wrote “for the professional.” The present essay however, is one of those rare introductory pieces he wrote several decades

Says Tavleen Singh in this amazing column. Read it fully. Good she discovered Rajiv Malhotra but sad she discovered him this late. And eminently surprising that Indian Express allowed this on its pages. The future president of India speaks to

Preface Perhaps it takes only a Meera Nanda to have the guts to strut her ignorance with such confidence. It took me a few days to digest what she actually wants to say. At the least, it is intellectually dishonest

I’m currently reading an interesting book (will post a review at a later date) which gives an interesting tidbit about the Indian system of Logic. The system that comes closest to the Western model of analytical philosophy is called Nyaya.

Here is a great article on Hindu revivalism in Jaffna: a depressing and inspiring account of how Jaffna combated centuries of vicious onslaught against Hinduism. After about 300 years of intense persecution under the Portuguese and the Dutch, the Hindus

Buried beneath and interspersed among the numerous layers of terse and detailed philosophical expositions are the thousands of amazing stories in the Upanishads. It is indeed a tragedy of our modern education system—that treats the human as no better than

Head over to this great piece by Mukta Raut. …I have observed that of all the religious communities, Hindus are the most clueless about their religion. I went to a convent school. We had a Moral Science period where the

Here’s my next installment of the Neeti Shataka. The verses are in no specific order but they are kind of thematic: Bhartruhari talks about fools in these. The poet stretches the limits of exaggeration in two verses here if only

My circle of friends is as large and varied as the interests, hobbies and passions of each person in that circle. There’s no one, absolutely no one there who hasn’t heard of or read the classic Autobiography of a Yogi.